DESCRIPTION (taken from application): This application requests funds to establish and support a Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (SREU) program at Albany Medical College, which is designed as an 8-week program to provide cross-disciplinary opportunities for 10 undergraduates majoring in Mathematics, Physics, Computer Science, or Engineering. With careful attention and significant effort, recruiting of these quantitative-thinking students from 15 colleges in the Northeast, 64 Historically Black Colleges and Universities throughout the Nation, and with special emphasis on recruiting students from seven selective colleges within a 200 mile radius of the Albany Medical College, we expect to generate a competitive applicant pool, from which top candidates will be selected. Students will spend two months in a laboratory doing meaningful, authentic, innovative research on a project specially designed for them, and with the active mentoring of an investigator who is NIH-funded and who has sufficient time and inclination to serve as a mentor for an undergraduate student. Students will spend the vast majority of their summer doing research in a laboratory, but will also have Enrichment Activities including safety training, Biomedical Information Search and Retrieval training, extensive training in issues of Scientific Integrity, interactive learning opportunities focusing on an Overview of Biology, seminars to broaden their awareness of biomedical research, training in scientific writing, making their own research presentations, and opportunities to explore career options while at Albany Medical College. The Program Director will provide extensive tracking and evaluation of the students and of the program, making adjustments as necessary and providing summative evaluations to all stakeholders. The program is designed to expose undergraduate students majoring in the quantitative sciences to a biomedical sciences environment, and eventually to help students be more competitive and contributory for careers in their own chosen profession. It is anticipated, for example, that a student with a quantitative background and with training in biomedical research would be in an ideal position to contribute to efforts in functional genomics, with emphases on bioinfomatics, in the coming decades.